1. Field of Art
The disclosure generally relates to the field of searching data entries from applications or services on a mobile computing device, more specifically, to organizing searched results from the applications or services for presentation to a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Mobile computing devices such as smartphones or personal digital assistants (PDAs) are continuously evolving into a more complex device with increasing computational and storage capacity. As the capacity of the mobile computing device increases, users are storing increasing amount of data on the mobile computing device, executing an increasing number of applications on the mobile computing device, and accessing an increasing number of services on the mobile computing device. The increased amount of data stored in conjunction with the increased number of applications and services are making it increasingly difficult for the users to retrieve the information the users want. The users must often navigate through a series of menus and screens associated with different applications or services to find and retrieve the data user wants.
Many applications or services have built-in search mechanisms to search data entries associated with the applications or services. In order to access these search mechanisms, the corresponding applications or services are first launched. The user then provides search conditions to the applications or services. The applications or services perform searches on their data entries and return the search results for presentation to the user. The users may then select the searched data entries to perform further functions.
Some search applications perform searches across various types of data entries associate with different applications or services. Such search applications interoperate with services or applications associated with the data entries to present search conditions to the services or applications, query the data entries using the built-in search mechanisms, and collect the search results from the services or applications for presentation to the users. Other search applications generate and maintain their own indexes of the data entries. When a query is received, such search applications run queries on its indexes and present the results to the users.